The Caine Mutiny

When recent naval graduate Keith is assigned to serve on the USS Caine, he’s greatly disappointed.  The Caine is the laughing stock of the fleet.  Rusty, dirty with laid back sailors, the Captain runs a sloppy, but functional ship.  When he retires, new Captain Queeg (Humphrey Bogart) vows to get everything back to strict Navy codes.  But his priorities seem out of whack.  He becomes so concerned over an un-tucked shirt tail that the ship runs over its own tow line and his officers start to question his abilities as captain.

The tow line is just the first strike.  Captain Queeg makes more rash and unpredictable decisions, including turning the whole ship upside down because someone ate the remaining leftover strawberries.  It’s not only his abilities the officers are doubting, but Captain Queeg’s sanity.  During a frightening typhoon, Lt. Steve Maryk (Van Johnson) relieves Captain Queeg and takes over in order to save the ship from destruction.  This heroic action is considered mutiny, and the remainder of the film takes place within a courtroom deciding Lt. Maryk’s fate.

Humphrey Bogart is always a delight to watch and here is no different.  His officers diagnose Queeg to be paranoid.  Bogart brings that to life with nervous habits, like clinking two metal balls in his hand.  The strawberries incident is funnier than it was probably meant to be.  He gathers all the officers around, asks how many servings they had, and to simulate the strawberries, he has a man scoop out servings of sand.  And towards the end when Queeg testifies, it’s a stirring moment only a great actor like Bogart could pull off.

The typhoon scene is one of the most memorable in the film.  The ship rocks back and forth so violently along the waves, it looks like it could capsize at any moment.  We sit on the edge of our seats and cringe while Queeg barks orders that will just make the situation worse.  The image of huge waves knocking the mast of the Caine apart is done so well, it’s scary.  Edward Dmytryk’s expert directing here is worthy of praise to this day, yet, he was not nominated for The Caine Mutiny.

This film can fit so many different personalities.  It’s about WWII, the Navy, justice, overthrowing and outsmarting authority, psychology and even has a dash of romance.  This mix is so well balanced that if you enjoy any of those things, I encourage you to see The Caine Mutiny.

“Ahh, but the strawberries that’s… that’s where I had them.”

Battleground

With WWII four years in the past, 1949’s Battleground was the sort of war movie that looked back on the Battle of the Bulge in a realistic manner.  Rather than a constant stream of heroics in battle, we see the men drudge through the woods, bewildered by the elements, mind games and question who is friend and foe.

We first meet our men at a base in France.  Private Jim Layton (Marshall Thompson) has just arrived with his friend Private William Hooper (Scotty Beckett).  Layton complains about how he thinks the army specifically goes out of their way to make life miserable by picking the worst place to set up base and making sure to always separate you from your friends.  He and Hooper have just been assigned to different platoons, but at least the men have a three day leave starting tomorrow where they will live it up in Paris.

Before Layton can even get comfortable among his new comrades, orders come in telling the men they have orders to move to the front tonight.  So much for Paris.  The men are packed up in the back of trucks and driven through France, not even sure of where they are.  They spend a night in a small town, where Holley (Van Johnson) starts flirting with a young woman there.  Being told they will still be here tomorrow, he puts off making a move on her, but they pack up the next morning, leaving Holley regretting his patience.

From the village they finally arrive in the woods of the battle.  It is foggy and they are told to be careful of spies and snipers, so the men rip off their shoulder patches.  A higher rank just makes you a better target.  From here on, the battle plays out in random bombardments and a few firefights.

The Germans have a psychological tactics up their sleeves.  They flood all the radio traffic and even play a song dedicated to the men of the 101st entitled “I Surrender Dear”.  Twice they drop flyers from planes with messages to make the men doubt themselves and lose faith.  As Christmas is upon them, one of the flyers mentions how hard it must be for these men to be away from home right now.

To counteract this psychological bombardment, the Chaplain (Leon Ames) holds a humble Christmas service for the men, using the hood of a jeep as an alter.  It is a sweet moment, making sure to cover all creeds; the Chaplain even asks a young Jewish soldier how his Hanukkah service was a while ago.  With bombing continuing and getting closer, the Chaplain has to end the service with each man praying in his own way since no one can hear him.  This is a small scene, but so important to restoring the men’s faith and moral after so many days in the brutally cold elements and uncertain warfare.

While this film still maintains the patriotic pride of WWII it is surprisingly realistic for the time period.  Many war films of the forties only show only clean and shiny war heroism and patriotism in hope of recruitment.  In those films, even if you die you’re still remembered as a hero.  Here, we get a few darker glimpses, where a man is killed and his platoon doesn’t even remember his name or the camera shies away from letting us see a boy kill a German with his bare hands.  We even get a small moment of cowardice, but it’s soon corrected and turns into an ambush opportunity.  1949 was not ready for war films to be brutally realistic yet, but Battleground was taking a big first step.

“The organist is hitting those bass notes a little too loud for me to be heard.  So let each of us pray in his own way, to his own God.”

The Human Comedy (Found from 1943)

On the surface, The Human Comedy is a story about the Macauleys, an American family during WWII.  The father (Ray Collins) has died two years ago, but provides narration in his afterlife.  Oldest son Marcus (Van Johnson) is away from home serving in the army, leaving middle teenage son Homer (Mickey Rooney) home working as a telegram delivery boy to help support the family.  Ulysses (Jackie ‘Butch’ Jenkins) is just a little boy asking his mother where his father and Marcus have gone and Mrs. Macauley (Fay Bainter) and sister Bess (Donna Reed) in her late teens run the home.

It wasn’t long before I was seeing a very mythological setup happening.  In the epic poems from ancient Greece, the Iliad and the Odyssey were written by Homer telling the story of Odysseus, known in some forms as Ulysses, who lives in Ithaca.  To me, that trifecta could not be ignored, but how is the story affected by the mythology?  I have come up with some unstable theories, but found nothing to back them up.  Perhaps Homer’s perspective on the war will help him guide his younger brother through life.  Maybe the misadventures Ulysses has and his childhood discoveries in the film can be compared to Odysseus’s journey.  But where does Marcus come in, does he simply personify the Trojan War?  What are we to make of the ghostly father?  Perhaps I’m trying to find too much meaning in a film that is simply about WWII on the American home front.

Homer works with two men.  Tom Spangler (James Craig) is younger and very encouraging to Homer, while white haired Willie Grogan (Frank Morgan) has been in the telegram business a long time.  Because of all the bad news Willie has been the barer to, he drinks too much.  He even gives Homer instructions on what to do if he becomes too drunk at work, which Homer does have to deploy a couple times.

As we expect, Homer’s job delivering telegrams brings heartache.  One touching scene is when Homer delivers his first telegram to inform a woman that her son had died in the war.  He’s nervous and to make matters worse, the woman cannot read.  As he reads the awful news to her, Homer nearly breaks down crying trying to comfort her by saying that maybe the army made a mistake.  This woman is still a mother, takes pity on the boy and gives him some candy.  She sits in a rocking chair, starts singing to herself and the image changes to her as a young woman cradling a baby in that same chair, then changes back.  The whole scene heartbreaking but unexpectedly sweet.

Throughout the film, we’re shown progress on Homer’s brothers.  Marcus plays the accordion and leads the men in songs to keep their spirits up, even as they’re on a train towards war.  He tells his new friend Tobey (John Craven) everything about Ithaca and his family, making Tobey want to live there after the war.  Meanwhile, little Ulysses has adventures around the neighborhood discovering the library and trying to steal apricots with the other boys.  One of the best moments with Ulysses is when he first discovers fear; he’s small enough that that concept hasn’t dawned on him yet. Ulysses is watching a man dressed as a clown in the drugstore window, after all the other people have dispersed the man scares Ulysses, sending the small boy crying in the streets.  When Homer finds him and asks what has scared him so badly, Ulysses becomes overjoyed realizing that he now understands what fear is.  It’s a sweet moment that also ties into Marcus realizing his fear of deployment and dying in the war.

In the end, The Human Comedy is wonderful film even though it seems to lack a real plot and the mythological references seem only half conceived.  This might be Mickey Rooney’s finest work, his Homer is heartfelt, driven and a wonderful portrait of a boy forced to grow up too fast because of the war.  If you want to see this film, it’s best to keep an eye on Tuner Classic Movies, it took me months to find this.

“Homer in Ithaca.  Sounds almost classic.”